MUSIC REVIEWS

Lee Shupp’s Rise Up has an exhortative quality befitting the album title. The eight energetic performances he’s written for this collection have varying textures while engaging listeners with gut-level immediacy. These are songs about flesh and blood life lived, not ideas or cliches, and he crouches them in everyday language that his …

In the vast landscape of indie folk music, B.D. Gottfried has carved out a niche all his own, and his latest offering, Ghosts & Girls serves as a testament to his artistic evolution and storytelling prowess. Produced and co-written with the Juno award-winning Siegfried Meier and mastered by the esteemed …

Old Man Jack is back in the headlines this spring with a deliciously rock-flavored blues jam in “Stone Cold,” and if you haven’t heard their music before, this song is a terrific way of getting introduced to their sound. Perhaps their most diversely-appointed composition so far, “Stone Cold” flexes a …

Pop music’s greatest hybrid features are becoming quite common in rock music these days, if not a new standard in the genre’s alternative scene, but there are still a handful of singer/songwriters around ready to answer prayers for old guard purities this spring. One of them is none other than …

Indie rock is an identity and one that has to be portrayed with a demeanor more indicative of humility than exaggerated confidence. While I don’t know that it’s fair to say that Champ de Mars are chasing their version of this identity solely to be true to form in their …

The new wave of Americana influences in pop started not too long ago and has only gotten stronger in the last few years, and in 2024 it’s bringing forth an era in provocative alternative folk music that a lot of us simply didn’t see coming. Phoenix duo Dorsten’s cerebral folk …

Greye’s new eleven-track release VII is a peak moment for this Florida four-piece. They’ve consistently churned out top-shelf material for more than ten years and show no signs of slowing down. VII finds their particular brand of Southern Rock 2.0 in fine fettle thanks to a varied instrumental attack, skillful songwriting, irrepressible energy, and …

Jake Allen (music), Jennifer Mann (paintings). In an era where music is predominantly consumed in bite-sized streaming formats, Refractions Volume I emerges as a breath of fresh air—a symbiotic audio/visual project that challenges the very notion of how we experience music. Created by the dynamic duo of Jake Allen and Jennifer …

Her single “It Was Always You” carries on a venerable songwriting tradition with character and flair. It’s a song about the aftermath of a relationship when the aggrieved partner realizes, hey, it wasn’t me who had the problem, it wasn’t me who failed “us” – it was you. Songs like …

You can’t ever accuse Universal Dice of aiming for the lowest common denominator. I believe songwriter Gerry Dantone and his cohorts merge thought provoking themes, adult subject matter, and beguiling musical settings better than many much more well-known contemporaries and are writing and recording music aglow with timeless attributes. Their …